File Activity & Notifications

File activity helps people follow shared work: whether a file arrived, what changed, or whether someone accessed a shared package. Notifications bring selected events to their attention. The useful evidence depends on the interaction, so begin with the file, folder, Share Link, or submission being investigated.

File History And Sharing Activity

File Actions / History records activity on files and folders. A user's access determines which history they can inspect. Administrators have additional site-wide logs for investigating transfers, connections, and configuration changes.

For a Share Link, its access records include the visitor's interaction and available registration information. Folder history also records file actions, but does not supply the same registration context. Use the link's records when the question concerns a particular invitation or visitor.

The event needs interpretation. Opening a supported preview records a Read event, like a download. The history does not distinguish those two actions. Passive thumbnail or grid browsing does not generate the same file activity. A Read record therefore establishes access, not that a person saved a separate copy, read every page, or completed a review.

Online co-authoring introduces another distinction. History attributes the session's saves to the user who started it. The editor's Track Changes feature is needed to attribute individual edits to collaborators.

Notifications For The Work You Follow

Email Notifications report selected folder activity to account users or Groups. Their scope can include subfolders and filters for actions, filenames, or participants. Choose the scope around the work someone is responsible for so that the message is actionable.

Ordinary users need History permission to configure their own folder notification. Partner Users need Read permission. Administrators can manage notifications for other users within their permitted scope.

Email notifications are batched at a configured interval; they are not immediate delivery guarantees. Share Link notifications separately cover events in the sharing interaction, such as invitations, registrations, and uploads. Visitor upload receipts confirm submissions to the visitor, while account-user notifications inform your staff.

For the supplier-invoice example, finance can receive a digest of new submissions. Operations can use Event Channels to receive a failure outcome from the onward transfer. A scheduled Expectation detects a missing delivery even if there was no new activity to generate an email.

A Missing Or Unexpected Message

First establish whether the relevant activity occurred and matched the notification's scope. A filename filter, an excluded subfolder, or visitor activity omitted from the notification can explain why another file event produced a message but this one did not.

The receiving account must also meet the notification requirements: it must be enabled, have an email address, and not be unsubscribed. After accounting for the batching interval, an administrator can use Outbound Emails to investigate whether a message was generated and what delivery status was recorded. A successful submission to the mail delivery path does not establish that the message appeared in the recipient's inbox.

Email troubleshooting follows the investigation into recipient filtering, bounces, and Custom SMTP. If someone should stop receiving activity, remove the notification or use its unsubscribe link: removing folder permission alone does not delete an existing notification.

When the question is whether a business transfer completed, follow the evidence in Activity, Delivery & Recovery. A message that a file arrived is only one stage of that investigation.